Team Jefferson, Linux, and Tommy

A LinuxPlanet
article gives a fairly complete account of Team Jefferson and their
Linux-based DARPA Grand Challenge robot, Tommy.
Paul Perrone and the
other members of Team Jefferson have chosen Fedora Linux as the
high-level OS for their robot. There are also embedded micro-controllers
handling lower-level functions. Linux is commonly used in robotics
aplications but Team Jefferson is unusual in that the chose Java as the
development platform for both the Linux box and the microcontrollers.
This "might raise a few eyebrows. After all, traveling at 40 miles an
hour is no place to get stuck doing a garbage collection pass."

You could always force garbage collection to happen more often so as
to limit the time it takes, or you could write your code in such a way
as to not need garbage collection virtually at all. At any rate, I
think Java's user agreement states something like don't use this
language in mission critical or potentially life threatinging
situations. :-)